I had a number of thoughts over the weekend about the ongoing torture debate—and in particular the historical turn it seems to have taken recently—but in lieu of one of my usual insanely bloated 3,000-word posts, perhaps it makes sense to spread them out over a few posts and focus on one or two main […]

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You know that Simpsons episode where the doctor explains that Mr. Burns is simultaneously suffering from almost every disease known to man, but remains healthy because they’re in a precarious equilibrium, like a horde of obese men simultaneously trying to squeeze through the “door” of his immune system? And in honor of that image, they […]

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We’ve all watched this scene play out in some movie or other, right?  “Hand over the codes to the Ultimate Genocide Ray or I’ll kill you, Hero Guy!” — “Never, Doctor Evil!” — “Very well, hand over the codes to the Ultimate Genocide Ray, or I’ll kill your girlfriend!” — “Gasp… you win, Doctor Evil!”  […]

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Matt Zeitlin finds something incongruous about (what used to be?) our special horror over torture. After all, he points out, any war we embark on—even the most just war you could imagine—involves the suffering and death of many innocent civilians. But the same rules don’t seem to apply there: If the generals determine that bombing […]

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I recently discovered that one of my favorite films, Last Year at Marienbad, was inspired by Adolofo Bioy Casares’ novella The Invention of Morel. I use the term “inspired” here in the loosest possible sense, as the plots of the book and movie (to whatever extent it’s appropriate to describe the movie as having a […]

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Peter Kirsanow wonders: The president apologizes — on three continents and before scores of foreign leaders — for the failures of America. This will aid in the restoration of America’s moral legitimacy. Several of the foreign leaders who heard the president’s apology come from nations that have a documented history of employing the following “enhanced interrogation […]

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Oh, FireDogLake: Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model. Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks […]

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I’m late to the ball here, but there have been an enormous amount of silly things written about redistribution in the past week or two. First, we have the claim that Barack Obama’s agenda is “socialist,” which is just sloppy. Words mean things, and “socialism” is about centralized economic planning and state control of the […]

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Here’s what seems especially puzzling about all the whining over the L.A. Times‘ refusal to release a tape of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi’s farewell dinner—aside from the fact that what we’ve read of Obama’s remarks there make it fairly clear that Obama found their conversations interesting and useful because they disagree about Israel. The […]

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Much media flutter over Joe Biden’s declaration that he believes “life” begins at conception. Since I’ve hammered this point too many times already, I outsource my response to Jill at Feministe, who reminds us that “when life begins”—despite being tossed about as though it’s somehow at the core of the debate about abortion—is basically an […]

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